Barrie Kosky's Ring cycle closes at Covent Garden, 21 January to 7 February 2027, with Antonio Pappano conducting. General booking opens on 21 October 2026.
Götterdämmerung is the end of the Ring, and the Ring is the largest thing anyone has written for a stage: four operas, fifteen hours, twenty-six years of work, and a purpose-built theatre to hold it. Wagner started with the death of Siegfried and then wrote backwards, adding each earlier opera to explain the last, which is why Götterdämmerung carries the weight of everything before it. Gods, a ring made from stolen gold, a hero who cannot be frightened and is therefore easy to deceive, and a fire at the end that takes the whole world with it.
Barrie Kosky’s cycle for this house reaches its conclusion here, and Antonio Pappano conducts — the house’s conductor laureate, who ran the music at Covent Garden for two decades and knows this orchestra better than anyone alive. Kosky is the first director to stage a complete Ring at this house since Keith Warner’s, twenty years ago, and the cycles have been given one opera a year rather than in a block.
It plays the Main Stage from Thursday 21 January to Sunday 7 February 2027, with Elisabet Strid, Andreas Schager and Mika Kares. It runs six hours and ten minutes, with a forty-minute interval and then a full hour, so the first curtain is at four in the afternoon and dinner happens inside the opera rather than after it.